Problems relating to efficiently processing large volumes of incoming mail are of significant concern to companies having a large customer base, particularly where customers are billed on a monthly basis. The end of the month volume of incoming mail in such companies is typically staggering. The manpower required to open such large volumes of mail and to sort and process the contents of such mail has contributed significantly to the companies' overhead which is typically passed on to the consumer via an increase in the cost of products and/or services.
Sophisticated equipment has heretofore been designed and utilized to reduce the time and the workforce required to process incoming mail. Such equipment has included automatic envelope openers that have been utilized in conjunction with automatic remittance processing equipment.
Small businesses which are unable to justify spending the funds necessary to procure a conventional automatic envelope opener have turned to utilizing envelopes which are designed for easy opening by mail room personnel. While such easy opening envelopes serve to make the manual envelope opening process somewhat easier, they still fall far short of providing a solution to efficiently handling and processing large volumes of incoming mail.
Automatic envelope opening equipment is commercially available in which envelopes are processed such that they are slit on one or more sides. Thereafter, such equipment either automatically removes the contents of the envelopes (and presents the contents to an operator) or delivers the slitted envelopes to an operator for content removal.
The present invention recognizes that such automatic envelope opening mechanisms have significant disadvantages. In this regard, the act of slitting or machining away the edge of an envelope has such serious drawbacks as increasing the probability that one or more edges of the documents in the envelope will be cut.
Under such circumstances, it is likely that the damaged document will be "rejected" by associated automatic remittance processing equipment which, for example, automatically reads preprinted information from the contents of the envelope, e.g., a bill or a check. Any increase in the number of items rejected by such remittance processing equipment adversely affects the overall mail processing speed and significantly detracts from the advantages of using automatic envelope opening equipment.
In order to reduce the risk of damaging internal documents, openers using slitting mechanisms have been designed to slit only an extremely limited portion of the envelope. By slitting such a limited portion of the envelope, such automatic openers at times do not operate to properly open the envelope with the expected high degree of success.
Other significant problems flow from the basic design of automatic openers which slit envelopes. In this regard, such openers present a hazard to mail room personnel due to the high speed knives or cutting blades that characterize such equipment. Additionally, in order to keep such blades razor sharp, a significant amount of maintenance and other servicing is required.
Additionally, such automatic envelope openers inevitably create a significant amount of paper dust by generating paper slivers during the envelope cutting process. Some of the dust and paper slivers is carried along with the envelope into other electronic devices that are utilized in automated remittance processing. Such remittance processing equipment typically includes optical sensing photocells for determining precisely where the envelope is in the processing path. Such photocells are prone to either failing or giving inaccurate readings due to the excessive dust which may result from the slitting of the envelopes.
Yet another conventional method of opening envelopes involves the use heat to cause the edge of the envelope to char to a point where the edge decays and falls away leaving the envelope open. The ash which is a by-product of such a process, as well as the ever present fire hazard, makes this method unsuitable for large scale utilization.
All of the above-described commercially available automatic envelope opening mechanisms have been designed to open a conventional envelope. By operating on such a conventional envelope, such envelope opening mechanisms have tended to utilize slitting mechanisms having the many disadvantages described above. Moreover, such automatic opening machinery, particularly the more sophisticated models, are so expensive that they are impractical for small to medium size businesses.
The present invention flowed from a recognition of the prior art problems described above and the discovery of a solution to such problems. The present invention overcomes the significant problems with the prior art automatic envelope opening mechanisms by incorporating a specially designed envelope and a companion envelope opening mechanism which operate in combination such that the envelope is automatically opened in a single motion to expose the contents of the envelope for high speed machine or manual extraction.
The envelope includes longitudinally disposed slits which run from a rear side fold line to points disposed along the length of the envelope along top and bottom fold lines. Disposed on the front wall of the envelope perpendicularly to the fold line slits are connecting members, a plurality of additional slits and a plurality of apertures. The plurality of apertures are disposed between the additional slits. The apertures provide openings into which extracting "fingers" of the automatic envelope opener enter the envelope during the envelope opening process to free a flap in the return address portion of the envelope to thereby expose the envelope contents.
The cooperating design of the envelope and the companion automatic opening mechanism, permits the automatic opening mechanism to be produced at a far less cost than prior art automatic opening mechanisms. Additionally, the present invention serves to insure repeatable envelope separation which promotes high speed automatic processing operations.